Exhibition «We Are Seventeen Years Old. A Collective Portrait»

Far from the clichés commonly used to describe adolescence, the exhibition brings together perspectives of their own, sometimes intimate, sometimes provocative, always honest. Each photograph or filmed fragment is a way of saying «this is who I am», «this is what surrounds me», «this matters to me». The result is not a single portrait, but a chorus of voices revealing the diversity of ways of being seventeen.

The project enters into dialogue with the photographs that filmmaker and photographer Johan van der Keuken took of his friends in 1955 when he was the same age. Those images, shown in Barcelona for the first time, find an echo in today’s creations.

For two years, students from Catalonia, Lithuania and Romania have worked in workshops led by A Bao A Qu alongside photographers, filmmakers and artists. In parallel, Filmoteca de Catalunya devotes a series to Van der Keuken, expanding the dialogue between generations and perspectives.